Improved treatment options for diseases require new drug development. Drug research and development, however, remain expensive and slow in large part due to inadequate methods for modeling diseases and evaluating potential therapeutics. Animal models, although widely used for such evaluations, raise numerous ethical concerns and are an imperfect medium for such research. In fact, approximately 90% of the therapeutics that succeed in animal models subsequently fail to advance through human trials. Therefore, efforts have been ongoing to engineer an in vitro environment that is configured to mimic, in vivo, human physiological conditions.
Efforts to engineer such environments remain inadequate. Cells in conventional, static culture dishes, for example, are not physiologically suitable for modeling blood vessels—the primary pharmacokinetic interface—because vascular cells cultured in the absence of appropriate hemodynamic stresses, such as shear, pressure, and stretch, fail to mimic the phenotype and function of cells from intact vessels. Many current or proposed solutions address just one of many variables necessary for suitable evaluation of therapeutics. For example, such current or proposed devices: (a) support only single cell systems; (b) do not provide any interfacial function; (c) provide interfacial function that is not configurable for perfusion; (d) are unable to mimic the layered architecture characteristic of various organ tissues performing barrier, transport, or both functions; and/or (e) are too complex or too expensive for widespread adoption.